On 24 January, before the end of their bachelor sojourn, Fleming, Bryce and Fox-Strangways motored down to Montego Bay on the north-west coast of the island for the opening of the Sunset Lodge Club. This is now seen as a seminal moment: the birth of what would become the ‘North Coast Jet Set’.
Fleming urged visitors to ‘embrace’ all aspects of Jamaica, including dangerous-looking food.
The hotel’s creator was Carmen Pringle, a charismatic and well-connected local figure. She was originally a de Lisser, a long-established white Jamaican family, but had married Kenneth Pringle, one of the sons of the Sir John Pringle who had bought the Hibbert estate in St Mary and subsequently became the island’s biggest landowner, with 100,000 acres of sugar, banana, citrus and cattle lands throughout the parishes of St Ann, St Mary and Portland. The marriage had produced a son, John Pringle, born in 1925, but had ended in separation. According to Molly Huggins, Carmen ‘really preferred women to men’.
The new hotel boasted offering ‘the last word in comfort and luxury without for one moment losing the charm and simplicity which is Jamaica’. A key selling point was ‘the only private beach in Montego Bay’. Sports on offer included golf, tennis, croquet and badminton; ‘Alligator shooting and polo can be easily arranged.’
Carmen Pringle had the idea of inviting the great and good of Britain and America to come to the beachfront hotel free of charge – with the exception of their bar bill – in return for telling their friends about the place. Fleming reported back to Ann that there was a ‘huge bonfire on the beach, and a lot of expensive people and two superb local bands playing the sort of Rum and Cococola tunes you like’.
The experiment was a great success. According to Blanche Blackwell, it was the moment when Jamaica was discovered by the international rich who had previously holidayed in the South of France. ‘When they found Jamaica, they found it so beautiful it wasn’t true,’ she says. ‘People arrived in Jamaica and just fell in love with it. Never wanted to leave it. It’s what made Jamaica come alive.’
Tourism in Jamaica dated back to the late 1870s, when Lorenzo Dow Baker, the boss of Boston Fruit, began ferrying Americans to the island in his banana boats. To cater for them, a small number of high-class hotels, including Myrtle Bank in Kingston, were constructed in the late 1880s, and in the 1900s Baker himself built the lavish 400-room Titchfield Hotel near Port Antonio. During the winter months, wealthy East Coast Americans would arrive on the banana boats from the US and stay for a few weeks enjoying balls and bridge evenings. In 1918, Baker purchased Myrtle Bank as well, reconstructed after suffering in the earthquake of 1907. The 1920s and 1930s saw development starting around Montego Bay, centred on Doctor’s Cave Beach, where a natural spring offered health benefits. In 1931, the world-famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh, in a four-engined Sikorsky S40, landed smoothly in Kingston Harbour, to the delight of many spectators; thereafter a regular Pan Am service was established from Miami to Kingston and, soon after, Montego Bay, where the graceful seaplanes landed off Doctor’s Cave Beach, an event that become a popular focus of Sunday outings for local Jamaicans. By 1938, visitor numbers had grown in a decade from 14,000 to more than 62,000.
By the time of the opening of Sunset Lodge, runways on the Palisadoes opposite Kingston and at Montego Bay, both built during the war for military purposes, were now in action, ferrying far more passengers than the seaplanes had coped with. At the beginning of 1948 the Gleaner would report, under the title ‘Here they come’: ‘Now the pace has become so fast and furious that it needs a strong man-about-town to survive it.’ Noting ‘dukes, duchesses, lords and ladies … wanting change from austerity and winter cold’, the reporter applauded the ‘variety that brings welcome colour and change to the monotony of our lives’. A new world of extreme luxury, a world that James Bond would make his own, was now being born in Jamaica.
One of the great attractions of the Bond stories is that Fleming takes his readers to faraway locations, which in the days before cheap air travel were beyond the reach of most. The only novel not to feature foreign adventure is Moonraker, and this would lead to complaints, including a letter to Fleming from an elderly couple: ‘We want taking out of ourselves, not sitting on the beach in Dover.’
Often Bond is simply a tourist, or, more exactly, engages with the world he is defending in a touristic way. For one thing, he loves travelling, particularly by air, the experience of which he feels almost sensually. Indeed, at the beginning of the short story ‘Quantum of Solace’, he announces that ‘I’ve always thought that if I ever married I would marry an air hostess.’ Bond enjoys journeying by train as well, particularly the ‘melancholy’ rhythmic sound of the wheels on the tracks, and many climactic scenes in the novels occur in the glamorous but precarious carriages and cabins of trains or airliners.
Fleming was to become an accomplished travel writer, and he was not shy of inserting large chunks of travelogue into the novels and stories. His touristic eye takes in details of restaurants, beaches, hotels and bars, even commentating, often in a grudging way, on value for money and standards of decor and service.
Furthermore, where he sends Bond – and where he doesn’t – is an important part of the success of the books. Fleming knew that his readers didn’t want ‘taking out of themselves’ to some gritty impoverished destination. Writing in 1963, he pointed out that the ‘sun is always shining in my books – a state of affairs which minutely lifts the spirits of the English reader [taking] him out of his dull surroundings into a warmer, more colourful, more luxurious world’. Apart from a flying visit to Sierra Leone 011 the last four pages of Diamonds are Forever, Bond never goes to Africa or South America – both at the time associated with poverty. Three of the novels are set largely in the United States (Diamonds are Forever, Goldfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me), an acknowledgement of the mystique that American wealth and modernity held for his readers, as well as a nod to the US market for his books. In another three the main action occurs in Jamaica (Live and Let Die, Dr No, The Man with the Golden Gun), with the Caribbean again making an appearance in Thunderball (allowing Fleming to indulge once more his love of underwater scenes inspired by Goldeneye). The short stories also feature Bermuda, the Seychelles, and Jamaica again twice. Fleming, sitting at his typewriter in Goldeneye, frequently delights in comparing the sunshine enjoyed by Bond in the Caribbean with the miserable weather back in England.
But his attitude to tourism is more than simply escapist, and in the course of his time in Jamaica it would alter, shaped by his experience of the rapidly expanding tourist scene on the island and his changing relationship with it.
The success of Sunset Lodge and everything that came in its wake owed a great deal to a storm off the coast of Jamaica in mid 1946. In its midst, on board his yacht the Zaca, was Hollywood superstar Errol Flynn.
‘After four days of storm I could not make out the nature of a curious body of land that rose from the sea,’ wrote Flynn in his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways. ‘What was it? Where were we? Suddenly the sky cleared sharply. Winds howled the clouds out, and a powerful sun illuminated the greenest hills I’d ever seen.’ The Zaca was steered to safety, and Flynn, who had made his name in the film Captain Blood, set in Jamaica, was ashore on the island for the first time. It was, he said, a ‘paradise’ more beautiful than any woman he had ever known. According to his widow, Patrice, it was Jamaica’s similarity to New Guinea, where Flynn had lived as a teenager, that was the secret of the attraction. Flynn quickly decided that ‘here I would buy property and settle. Here I would salvage myself.’ Within a year he had purchased land near Port Antonio and built a house. Whenever he ‘drew a big pay cheque’, he invested it in land and livestock in Jamaica and soon had over 2,000 acres.
Errol Flynn, ‘discoverer’ of the attractions of Jamaica, aboard his latest yacht, 1941.
‘I cut an imperial figure along the north shore of Jamaica,’ he later wrote (an interesting choice of adjective), describing how each day
he would ride over his land on horseback. ‘Then perhaps a trip in my motor boat around Navy Island or down the coast. At night, a stroll in the market place of Port Antonio. You get the feeling you have gone back 150 years … Everywhere there is rum and calypso music.’ Flynn was loud in his praise of Jamaica, and following in his wake came other Hollywood stars, including Bette Davis, Grace Kelly, Ginger Rogers and Claudette Colbert.
Soon after Flynn’s arrival in Jamaica, he received a letter from Joseph Blackwell, an ex-Irish Guards officer who in 1936 had married Blanche Lindo. Flynn and Blackwell had a mutual friend in Ireland. ‘Joe took me to his house to meet his wife,’ said Flynn. ‘She hadn’t wanted to see me, for she was ill. But when I arrived and met this palefaced girl with dark, intense eyes and beautiful teeth, and a laugh like the sound of water tinkling over a waterfall, we fell into the most animated conversation.’ Blanche and Flynn quickly became so close that he thought about proposing, even though they were both still married, Flynn to his second wife Nora Eddington. But he feared rejection and that he would spoil their friendship. Instead, he writes, ‘Blanche and I formed an enduring friendship amazingly platonic.’ Blanche would later describe Flynn as a ‘gorgeous god … he was the most handsome man I’ve ever seen in my entire life. He had a wonderful physique.’
Blanche Blackwell, to whom Ann Fleming would later refer as ‘Ian’s Jamaican wife’, had been born in 1912. Her family, the Lindos, were originally Sephardic Jews, forced to flee Spain during the time of the Inquisition. After Venice, Amsterdam and Bordeaux, the family ended up in Jamaica in the mid eighteenth century. There they made and lost fortunes as traders, including in slaves. At the end of the nineteenth century, Blanche’s branch of the family decamped to Costa Rica, where they pioneered growing bananas and coffee, developing highly profitable plantations. In 1915, the banana lands were sold to United Fruit for $5 million, and the family returned to Jamaica, where they invested the huge sum in sugar and acquired Jamaica’s leading rum producer, J. Wray and Nephew. Blanche’s father Percy also bought a lot of the old sugar estates near Oracabessa. These were by now planted with bananas and coconuts.
The Lindos were probably the richest family in Jamaica. This meant that no one was quite good enough to be friends with Blanche, and she remembers a solitary, lonely childhood. She was tutored at home by a seventy-year-old Englishman and had little opportunity to make friends. ‘I just wasn’t allowed to know any black people,’ she remembers. ‘Which was a pity.’
Her mother did not bother to conceal her preference for her sons; Blanche’s favourite childhood memories are of her father, and riding with him to inspect the plantations. She would remain a keen horsewoman, energetic and down-to-earth – very different from Ann Fleming.
When she was sixteen, Blanche was sent to school in England, then to finishing school in Paris. She was presented at the British court in 1933 and met Joseph Blackwell on one of her family’s frequent trips to England. Shortly afterwards, he appeared in Jamaica as part of the entourage of the visiting Duke of Kent. On Blanche’s next trip to London, the pair were married. According to their son Chris, Joe was ‘a very handsome man. He loved women and women loved him.’ Chris was born in 1937, a year after his parents’ wedding. Joseph was given a job on one of the St Mary estates, but the family lived in a lavish mansion in Kingston, Terra Nova.
Shortly before the end of the war, Blanche travelled to England to put Chris into a boarding school. At first based at the Grosvenor Hotel, she then lived at a house in a village outside Newbury, Berkshire. Trips back to Jamaica continued but she looked to make her life in England. She would divorce Joe in 1949 and it would be another six years before she returned to Jamaica and met Ian.
In spite of their shared enthusiasms for drinking and womanising, Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming never got on, and they avoided each other as much as possible in the goldfish-bowl social life of Jamaica’s north coast. According to Flynn’s widow Patrice, Errol found Ian ‘pretentious and full of himself’. For Ian, perhaps Flynn was just too Hollywood. In From Russia, with Love, Bond is offended when Tatiana says he looks like an American film star: ‘For God’s sake! That’s the worst insult you can pay a man.’
Ian was fast coming to rival Flynn as Jamaica’s most noted expatriate lothario, even though Ann had promised fidelity to him, apart from what was strictly necessary with her husband. During both the 1947 visit and his first extended trip the year before, Fleming was carrying out a high-profile affair with Millicent Huttleston Rogers, a wealthy socialite who was heiress to part of the immense Standard Oil fortune and a regular visitor to Jamaica. A dark-haired beauty in her mid forties, Rogers was energetic, outgoing and an exhibitionist, with a penchant for appearing in fancy dress costumes. She was also even more obsessed with sex than Ian. Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett tells the story of how she once turned up to a party in Jamaica with two Navajo Indians, informing anyone who asked, and even those who didn’t: ‘Yes, I’m fucking them both.’
Ian ended the relationship before he left Jamaica, and wrote to Ann that he had been having a ‘botched affair’, where ‘everything starts wrong and goes on wrong and getting wronger’. But still, other women had been invited back to Goldeneye to sample the snorkelling on the reef, including ‘an admiring sugar planter’s daughter’, who repaid the favour by donating two smart chairs to the house’s meagre and uncomfortable furniture collection.
Ian also acquired a canasta table for Goldeneye from Molly Huggins, the wife of the Governor, who was still in the process of upgrading King’s House. Molly and Ian had met through Bill Stephenson on his visit the year before. ‘His days of fame … were still to come,’ she later wrote of Ian. ‘But even then, what a brilliant, clever person he was! He was so good-looking in a rugged way.’ Visiting him at Goldeneye, she found the house ‘rather austere’, but the beach ‘beautiful’. The two became ‘firm friends’. Ian taught her to ‘swim under water and spear fish’, which she enjoyed in spite of cutting her foot so badly on a piece of coral that she almost had to miss the finals of the Montego Bay tennis tournament the next day. The following summer, Ian lent her Goldeneye for her mother and two eldest daughters to stay in.
Molly now had a spectacular new project. To blame for Jamaica’s poverty and its attendant family breakdown, she had decided, was the high proportion of children born illegitimate. ‘If the moral standard of the women can be raised,’ she declared, ‘the whole island will benefit.’ The answer was to encourage marriage. But no Jamaican, she was told, would marry without a gold ring to hand over, which most could not afford. So Molly did a deal to buy wholesale from a London jeweller 2,000 gold rings, to be passed on at five shillings each, rather than the two or three pounds’ going rate in Kingston. She then organised a string of mass weddings, with fifteen couples at a time, who ‘came in cars, on mules, donkeys and horses’. These weddings were graced by an appearance from Lady Molly herself, with tea and cakes provided by the Women’s Federation.
The ‘moralising mission’: Lady Molly, centre, presides over a mass wedding of black Jamaicans. Many Jamaican women were less than happy with the legal and property implications of marriage and the experiment was not a success.
Her attitude to her own marriage was somewhat different, however. For her own conduct, she preferred ‘the Continental attitude’. ‘I didn’t quite see how two people could be expected to be physically faithful for all their lives, however fond of each other they might be … I saw no harm in occasional love affairs by either party,’ she wrote in her memoir, in which she is very frank about her sex life and her sexual appetite. Blanche Blackwell, who remembers her vividly, went as far as to describe her as a ‘nymphomaniac’. Even before she had arrived in Jamaica, Molly writes, the difference in age with her husband had begun to tell. One source of conflict, apparently, was that he was jealous of ‘the love of the people of Jamaica for me’. Soon after taking up residence in King’s House, she began a long-running affair with Bobby Kirkwood, Tate & Lyle’s ma
n in Jamaica. Little effort was made to keep it under wraps. Nor was Kirkwood the sole beneficiary of her affections; there were a number of other men who became ‘firm friends’.
Fleming returned to England in March 1947 in love with the Jamaica he had discovered. It would be the subject of his first substantial piece of writing, for Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine. What seems to have made the biggest impression on him was the spectacular beauty and range of the island’s flora and fauna. He writes of the ‘2,000 different varieties of flowers’ (in fact, there are more than three thousand, of which a thousand are endemic), as well as ‘innumerable butterflies and humming-birds and, at night, fireflies of many kinds’. Although he was a lover of nature from an early age, Jamaica brought out the ornithologist in Fleming. We learn of the ‘frigate birds, black and white, with beautifully forked tails, and dark blue kingfishers’ that ‘hang over the reef’, and the ‘clumsy pelicans and white or slate grey egrets’ that ‘fish at the river mouths’.
This passion for the natural world, in part inspired by the beauty of Jamaican wildlife, would become a recurring theme of the Bond stories. The short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’ opens with the declaration that ‘The most beautiful bird in Jamaica, and some say the most beautiful bird in the world, is the streamer-tail or doctor humming-bird.’James Bond never kills a bird or a mammal – except humans – and rarely kills a fish except to eat. Anyone who does kill a bird in a Bond story invites Bond’s fiercest anger and always ends up deservedly dead: Mr Big’s associate ‘the Robber’ in Live and Let Die, who shoots a pelican for fun; Von Hammerstein in ‘For Your Eyes Only’, who blasts an innocent kingfisher; Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, who shows off his shooting skills by killing two kling-kling birds. (Bond even criticizes Gala Brand in Moonraker for picking a flower.) And if cruelty to nature is a sure sign of villainy, an appreciation and knowledge of the natural world, such as are shown by fictional Jamaicans Honeychile Rider and Quarrel, are a certain indication of good character.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 5
